The supply and availability of information has increased in the past years. With this increased availability of information individuals researching a specific topic may be bombarded with a large list of information pertaining to the topic. For example, a user researching the final closing papers of all the home sales in San Francisco in the year 2000, may obtain a list of thousands of results.
Currently, it is difficult for a user to organize or group this information down to a more manageable size without deleting some information, or breaking the large list into smaller, individual lists. Either way it is difficult to organize all the information within the original document in a more manageable form.
In addition to the increase in availability of information, individuals often have a large number of different types of information which they wish to keep organized in a particular fashion. This information may be, for example, e-mails found in a individual's e-mail application, documents, files, databases, contents within databases, and newsgroup information.
Currently, a typical way to organize these types of information is to either create folders and place the e-mails, documents, files, databases, newsgroup and other information into the desired folder or print the information out and store a hard copy. In either solution the documents are moved or copied from their original location, thereby increasing the likelihood that some or all of them may be lost, misplaced, or forgotten. Additionally, organizing or grouping information found within a database or spreadsheet without creating additional spreadsheets or databases for the specific information is difficult to do using current systems.
In addition to the increased need to organize information of the same type, such as e-mails, documents, or files, there is also a need for individuals to be able to easily organize or group objects of different types into one group, which may be easily accessed. For example, an individual preparing for a meeting may receive ten e-mails from colleagues regarding the meeting, and download information or documents from the Internet that will be used in the meeting. Current techniques for organizing this information include printing all the information out and storing it together, taking up valuable work space, and again increasing the likelihood of the information being lost, misplaced or forgotten, or saving the emails as files and create a folder on a computer and store all the information there. Alternatively, an individual may store all the Internet files or documents in one location and store the e-mails in a created folder.
There are a number of disadvantages with the current techniques for organizing information.
First, it is currently difficult to organize or group information of the same or different types without creating a separate folder and storing the information in the folder. In addition to the likelihood of possibly losing, misplacing, or forgetting the information, it is difficult to keep “reminders” of the topics, which these objects were organized for, in a central location for easy reference. Having to place the information in one or sometimes multiple folders increases the complexity of organization.
Second, it is currently difficult to designate a single object as a representative for a group of objects when displaying a set. Being able to display only one object for a group simplifies organization and reduces the amount of needed display space.
Third, current types of collections behave very differently from individual pieces of information. For example, although one piece of information can be part of different collections, it is difficult to treat a grouped set of information, or a folder of information as inseparable during searches or other mechanisms by which documents are found. In other words, folders or collections cannot “represent” a specific piece of information as the result of a search.
Fourth, it is currently difficult to retrieve information related to a topic unless that information contains specific search terms or properties. For example, if searching for all information related to an upcoming meeting using the search term “meeting,” it is currently difficult to obtain relevant information if the information does not contain the search term “meeting.”
Therefore, it is desirable to produce a system which can organize and group pieces of information, whether they be e-mails, documents, files, databases, spreadsheets, or portions thereof. Additionally, it is desirable to produce a system which provides easy access to the organized information in a central interface in such a way that the needed display space is reduced. Also, such a system which reduces complexity, increases organization, and provides the ability to return a representative of a group as the result of a search is desirable.